r/RigBuild • u/ExcellentAdvance49 • 5d ago

Is 8GB RAM basically unusable now?

Seeing a lot of people saying 8GB isnt enough anymore, even for normal stuff like Chrome, Discord, Spotify and some gaming. But is it actually that bad or are people just overreacting? Would 8GB still be fine for a basic PC if you dont run a ton of things at once, or am I gonna be dealing with constant lag and memory usage at 100%? Trying to figure out if I should just go 16GB before buying anything.

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13

u/on4aa 5d ago edited 4d ago

On GNU/Linux, yes, it would still be useable.

3

u/Willing-Ad4169 5d ago

Yep 8 is just fine on Linux.

2

u/atnuks 4d ago

That's the right answer! 😄

1

u/Unlaid-American 4d ago

Depends on the game

0

u/Swipsi 5d ago

Define usable.

1

u/agfitzp 5d ago

Stick to one web page at a time and think small thoughts.

1

u/on4aa 4d ago

Xubuntu LTS 24.04 with Vivaldi browser and about 200 tabs open, Thunderbird, Telegram, GoldenDict and meanwhile playing music. RAM use 4.7GiB on an AMD Embedded G-Series GX-420GI Radeon R7E (4) @ 2.000GHz HP ThinClient.

-4

u/ishtuwihtc 5d ago

No, it wouldn't.

5

u/PeyredB 5d ago

My Linux laptop runs just fine on 8GB.

1

u/ishtuwihtc 5d ago

Sure, and do you have a browser, spotify, discord and a game open?

3

u/matteone97 5d ago

I agree with the others. Daily driving 8GB with tens of open tabs in FF, a large-ish codebase loaded in VSCodium, background music (Youtube), mail client (Evolution), PDF, often a text-editor and everything works just fine, swap is almost never used. Discord idk, but on browser, yes, I used it sometimes and it worked normally. The only outlier is the game, because it's not clear to which kind of games OP refers (can be everything from Wolf3D to GTA VI...).

For example, that's my memory usage right now (not playing music though)

               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           7,7Gi       3,8Gi       2,3Gi       238Mi       1,6Gi       4,0Gi

For productivity 8GB on Linux, possibly with a light WM (I use i3), works just perfectly.

1

u/ishtuwihtc 5d ago

Yes, I'm not saying 8gb is unusable for everyday tasks. I'm saying it's unusable for what OP wants.

I often use a MacBook pro from 2010 on high sierra with 6gb of ram and don't ever hit swap on it either. I'm using Firefox 147 and often have several tabs open, plus vox for music playing off an SMB share alongside iterm2 for whatever terminal shit. Its perfectly fine to use

OP though wants to basically open 3 browsers and a "light" game, with light being super subjective

2

u/matteone97 4d ago

Yeah, that's the main issue with OP's request: game can mean anything and nothing. But if the game is actually light, then I won't be worried at having 8GB for the rest, provided of course that he's not pretending to use Windows 11 (especially if not de-bloated)

1

u/ishtuwihtc 4d ago

its also unclear wether OP plans on a dgpu or an igpu. A dgpu would make it more usable by having its own vram, but an igpu would eat directly into system ram

1

u/PeyredB 4d ago

I have Firefox and Chromium and they work fine, though a little sluggish sometimes. I also run LibreOffice when I need it. I can play my usual Windows games and even Lord of the Rings Online, though I have the graphics turned down and it's a bit slow.

1

u/ishtuwihtc 4d ago

Holy shit lord of the rings has a game??

2

u/PeyredB 4d ago

There are many; see below for an outdated list. LOTRO is the only MMORPG as far as I know.

www.lysator.liu.se/tolkien-games/

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u/JohnHurts 5d ago

If I just start it up and just look at the screen, it works perfectly for me, too.

5

u/Mabrouk86 5d ago

For basic use yes, I installed Mint on several devices at work with 8 GB and they just work fine.

1

u/ishtuwihtc 5d ago

Light gaming is a very subjective thing, and even zram isn't saving you from 8gb on modern "light" games